April 2010 Flying cross-country by visual flight rules is a far less precise endeavor than flying IFR (see Robert Goyer’s IFR Flight Prep: A Whole New Game April 2010 article for more info). As a former Navy fighter pilot turned GA pilot once put it, VFR flight consists of “sniff-checking your way through weather” –– especially in a fairly slow airplane. Regardless of how much planning you’ve done, or what the weather folks told you just 10 minutes before you took off, or how much whiz-bang technology you’ve brought to bear in your planning, what really matters is reacting smartly to the ever-changing information that your “Mark II eyeball” technology sees out of the cockpit window.
As a result, a lot of VFR pilots I know put far less weight on all that preflight technology and effort. My partner in a Cessna 120, who’d been flying tailwheel airplanes for a dozen years before we bought the Cessna together, had an approach that consisted, more often than not, of looking at the local weather to make sure it was VFR — which meant standing on the airport ramp and looking up at the sky — and then launching in the general right direction, figuring out the rest from there. He figured it eliminated the ultimately useless time spent poring over forecasts and charts that wouldn’t turn out to be right anyway.
